Badass Decay: The ORN Faust in IV was impervious to all of Rynex's weaponries, even possessing it in the end; in VI it's vulnerable even to Rynex's supposedly-less-powerful mass-produced incarnation, and multiple of them wind up permanently destroyed by Earth and Galaxy Federation forces.

Free Range in V. Even the manual of the North American version describes it as the strongest weapon in the game and encourages you to use it.

In VI, the only ship you can initially play as starts off with all of its weapons and never loses them, which by Thunder Force standards is pretty broken. In other words, the default ship is more broken than the unlockable Rynex-R.

V's Final Boss starts off with the usual Boss Warning Siren and text "ALERT! The enemy is dead ahead! [...]", only for the AI voice to malfunction and the screen to be filled with "ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! [...]" with no advance warning.

Thunder Force V's bad ending: Cenes is subject to repeat what happened to Rynex Vasteel, only instead of ejecting from the ship, she is trapped in it.

The good ending as well. While heartwarming music plays, the Last Letter scene is still a bit spooky.

Enemy/boss design in the games are often pretty Nightmare Fuel-y too, like the Evil Core in IV's eighth stage—a putrescent-looking thing that's served by little white flies that explode. And in its final phase (where a single giant fly is carrying it around), it basically drools its attacks out.

The Easy Mode ending as well. It consists of a dark screen of flashing images and the eyes of the ORN Emperor while ominous chanting in the background is heard as ORN Faust calls for Earth's unconditional surrender using a darker version of The Guardian's speech from V.

Somehow, C-CTNs-C's (a.k.a. Cenes Crawford)appearance in Thunder Force VI is a bit creepy to some people.

For some reason, Thunder Force AC has a really slow autofire rate, forcing players to furiously mash the fire button to achieve the same rate of fire as the Genesis version's autofire. And then there's Thunder Spirits, a port of AC with still no autofire and lots of slowdown.

Thunder Spirits actually has autofire, it just has to be turned on in the options menu, which for some reason is hidden instead of being obviously accessible. Ostensibly this was all to make the game more challenging. It does, but probably not in the way that was intended.

Sequel Displacement: Few gamers have heard of the original Thunder Force (it doesn't help that it was released in 1983 on an obscure Japan-only computer platform), and even fewer have played it.

Sequelitis: VI was released 10 years after V, and came to be a big disappointment among fans, with only six short stages, a radically different soundtrack, excessive homages to past games, weapons as broken as Thunder Force V's, and a new weapon mechanic in which you start with every weapon and never lose any of them.

So Okay, It's Average: Thunder Force VI, which did not quite catch the high expectation its previous titles had anticipated.

They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Thunder Force VI- the ORN Empire has found its way to Earth despite Cenes Crawford's and the Guardian's best efforts, Earth forces have revived the Sword Fleet just in time to make a stand at their homeworld's orbit, and their most advanced weapon, the RVR-00 Phoenix fighter with Brigadine booster, is about to deal the first blow...... and all we get from that story angle is a mere cutscene.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy